Many enterprises have experienced a dramatic increase in the number of computers and applications employed within their organizations. When a business group in an enterprise deploys a new application, one or more dedicated server platforms are typically added to host the new application. This type of environment is sometimes referred to as “one-app-per-box.” As more business processes have become digitized, a “one-app-per-box” environment leads to an inordinate number of server platforms. As a result, administration costs of the server platforms increase significantly. Moreover, the percentage of time that the server platform resources are actually used (the utilization rate) can be quite low.
To address these issues, many enterprises have consolidated multiple applications onto common server platforms to reduce the number of platforms and increase the system utilization rates. When such consolidation occurs, coordination of the resources of the platform between the multiple applications is appropriate. For example, it is desirable to provide a scheduling mechanism that controls access to processor resources by the various threads of the supported applications. Some scheduling mechanisms (e.g., “workload management” functionality) provide a set of shares, rules, priorities, service level objectives, and/or the like to control the scheduling of processes.
One example of workload management involves creating multiple virtual partitions in a shared resource domain. Various resources (such as processors, memory, input/output (IO) resources, and/or the like) are typically assigned to each virtual partition. Also, a respective operating system can be executed within each virtual partition. Respective groups of related applications may be executed within each virtual partition. The configuration of the virtual partitions provides a degree of isolation between the groups of applications of the various virtual partitions. Additionally, a workload management process may be executed within each virtual partition to control access to resources within the virtual partitions. Specifically, within a particular virtual partition, the workload management process may schedule access to processor resources between the applications of the group assigned to the virtual partition.
In addition to workload management within virtual partitions, another level of resource management occurs by reallocating resources between the virtual partitions. Specifically, if the workload management process within a virtual partition determines that service level objectives cannot be obtained for the group of applications, the workload management process may request additional resources from a “global” workload management process. Upon the basis of rules, shares, priorities, service level objectives, and/or the like, the global workload management process may shift resources from another virtual partition to the requesting partition. For example, if the other partition has excess resources, those resources can be reassigned to the requesting virtual partition. The use of workload management functionality enables the utilization rates associated with computing resources to be improved. Accordingly, workload management functionality enables a more efficient use of computing resources.